One of the purposes of dry-docking ships is to inspect the ships bottoms for cracks which may lead to structural failures. The dry-docking also enables inspection for anti-fouling protection, corrosion, and extent of biological growth. This routine procedure has not been feasible with very large ships, such as aircraft carriers and super tankers, because of the lack of dry-docks which are large enough to receive such ships. The few very large dry-docks are used steadily for new construction, and therefore are not readily available for inspection purposes. This is unfortunate since the very large new ships are pushing the state-of-the-art structural design and should have regular inspection to ensure their structural integrity. An unfortunate incident was the loss of two super tankers which broke up in 1974 due to a storm in the South Pacific. Possibly a routine inspection would have disclosed a structural defect in these ships which could have been corrected to avoid the tragic result. Consequently, these large new ships should be inspected even more frequently than the smaller ships.